Thursday, September 27, 2007

Why hairy men deride women

For its technical boring stuff, evolution can be a challenging read. Yet it is fun too, as in good for entertainment. How respected scientists would go out of their way to spin tall tales about things they have no way of proving is quite entertaining. But today's story is a true rib tickler.

My grandmother, a great storyteller who taught me the art, would tell me how humans are closely related to monkeys and baboons. But in her order of things, the relationship was the complete reverse of the Darwinian, namely that they degenerated from humans not the other way round. Here’s how the story goes:

A long, long time ago, longer than any living person could fathom, there were no monkeys or baboons in the world. Then some human beings refused to work their farms and went off into the bush to seek freebies. As years passed, they gradually became hairy as they degenerated into wild animals. They lost all human traits, among them walking upright, speech, wearing clothes, using tools and fire, and living in houses.

What was most fascinating about my grandmother’s reverse evolution theory was that she was able to “demonstrate” that beyond looks, or mere physical similarities, there was a discernible lingering memory, some consciousness, among the primates about their days as humans.

ME: This story has tickled my funnybone quite a bit. Obviously unaware of it, Okoiti claims his grandma told him this story,and he acknowledges she is dead. At the end, he leaves it to her "to debate Darwin and come up with something more convincing". It means he does not believe what Darwin said. He also doesn't believe his grandma's story.

Notice that in the online edition, Nation gave the headline as 'Grandma's RESERVE evolution theory'